She’s had three letters. One from Zander, addressed at Goree, and two from Mungo, addressed respectively from the Cape Verde Islands and Pisania. The Pisania letter came last week. It lay flat as a dagger in the postman’s palm, and the sight of it, sharp-edged and white, nearly cut her heart out. She thrust the envelope into her bag and hurried up the street in a nervous little jog trot, blood singing in her ears. She went through the front gate in a daze, the stairs echoed under her feet with a hundred insinuating creaks and groans, and then she was alone in her room. For a long while she just sat there at the edge of her bed studying the familiar handwriting scrawled across the envelope, fighting the impulse to chuck the whole thing in the fire. A quarter of an hour passed. And then, calm and deliberate as the tax collector, she slit the envelope with a paper knife and extracted the folded letter.
It said nothing.
Like its predecessor it was full of bravado and self-congratulation, talk of sturdy asses and stout-hearted men. He would lay the Niger flat, Mungo would, tape-measure and chart it end to end and be home in plenty of time to carve the Christmas goose. There were a few words of solicitude for her and the children toward the end. He hoped that the new baby was healthy and happy and that it was a boy. The letter was dated April 29: nearly five months ago.
She is waiting for another. She is waiting for Mungo to come back to her. She is waiting to resume her life. In the meantime, there are the children. Thomas, child of the century, is five, Archibald, born in April, has been weaned to applesauce and oatmeal mush. Together with Mungo junior and little Euphemia, they raise a persistent whining clamor that either soothes her with its substance and immediacy or drives her to distraction, depending on her mood. She hasn’t touched her microscope since spring. She is bored. It’s the same old story.
With one exception: Georgie Gleg. He spent the summer at Galashiels, away from the university and his practice. Each day he called on her in Selkirk with some offering, a bundle of flowers, box of sweetmeats, a three-volume novel. He took her out into the country in his carriage, brought her to dinner at what was left of the family estate at Galashiels. He entertained her. Distracted her from her brooding, her waiting, the stark gut-wrenching fears that clouded her days and haunted her nights.
Eyebrows were raised around town. Her father lectured her. She was a married woman, after all, and married to a saint and hero at that. She knew it, and felt a prick of conscience. But she felt just as strongly that she no longer owed Mungo anything, that he’d deceived and betrayed her and that she would do as she pleased, propriety be damned. Besides, her seeing Georgie was simply a reflection of her need for companionship — at worst no more than an innocent flirtation. The very fishwives who were so ready to cluck their tongues could be found out back of the inn on a Saturday night rolling and grunting in the bushes like sows in heat. No: they could all be damned. They had no idea what she was going through, no idea what it was like to be at the end of your rope.
♦ THE LETTER ♦
Segu. A rainy afternoon in mid-September, 1805. Beneath the high whitewashed walls of Mansong’s compound, a huddled queue of supplicants awaits the call to enter and pay obeisance to the potentate. They are a motley crew: tribal officials from the west in soggy sarongs and limp feathers, petulant-looking Moors with slabs of salt wrapped in antelope skin, old men in rags crouched over sorry goats, bullocks and monkeys. There are lepers and wastrels, singing men, beggars, slaves. And then there are the women. Big, broad-beamed village scolds with rolls of spun cloth, wicker baskets, caged songbirds and serval cats on leashes, ancient hags clutching baskets of wild tamarind to their withered dugs, barefoot girls, bright and nubile in indigo gowns and copper bracelets, lined up for inspection like birds of paradise.
At the far end of the queue, footsore and soaked to the skin, stand the forlorn figures of Serenummo and Dosita Sanoo, servants of Isaaco the scribe and emissaries of the tobaubo Park. The asses beside them are laden with rare and exquisite gifts intended for Mansong and his son Da. Gifts that range from the purely practical (silver tureens, double-barreled guns and kegs of black powder), to the epicurean (a case of Whitbread’s beer and a string of blood sausage), to the merely fanciful (six pairs of velvet gloves, a pince-nez on a gold chain and a music box that grinds out the first eight bars of the “Ombra mai fu” aria from Xerxes). More importantly these humble envoys have been entrusted with a letter from explorer to potentate, a letter written and conveyed with the utmost secrecy, three slips of paper the explorer seemed to consider as precious as gold, as potent as a saphie.
This letter. It was to be delivered only into the hands of Mansong himself, the explorer had insisted, his pupils shrunk to pinpoints of furious intensity; under no circumstances were its contents to be revealed to anyone else — not Wokoko, not the towering praetorian guardsmen, especially not to the Moorish merchants of the bazaar and most especially not to Dassoud or any of his henchmen. There was a strange, almost mystical look on the white man’s face as he handed over the letter and repeated his instructions for the fifty-seventh time. Serenummo will never forget it. The tobaubo looked like a tribal necromancer perched high above the trees on some stony pinnacle, his arms spread wide, steeling himself for the leap into faith. Or oblivion.
Bambakoo, the River Joliba
10 September, 1805
To Mansong the Magnificent, Liquidator of Lions and Tamer of Topi, Mansa of Bambarra, Waboo, M’butta-butta, Wonda, Etc.
Your Royal Highness:
I am that white man who nine years ago came into Bambarra. I then came to Segu, and requested Mansong’s permission to pass to the eastwards; your Highness not only permitted me to pass, but magnanimously presented me with fifty thousand cowries to purchase provisions along the road. This generous conduct has made Mansong’s name much respected and revered in the land of the white people. Accordingly, the king of that country has sent me again into Bambarra, as his ambassador in good will, and if your Highness is willing to again grant me a hearing, I shall outline my reasons for returning to your great country.
Viz., your Grace well knows that the white people are a trading people, and that all the articles of value which the Moors bring to Segu are made by us. If you speak of a good gun, who made it? The white people. If you speak of a good piece of scarlet or baft, or beads or gunpowder, who made them? The white people. We sell these goods to the Moors; the Moors bring them to Timbuctoo and sell them at a higher price. The people of Timbuctoo sell them to you at a still higher price. Now, the king of the white people wishes to find a way by which we may bring our own merchandise to you, and sell everything at a much cheaper rate than you now pay. For this purpose, if Mansong will permit me to pass, I propose sailing down the Joliba to the place where it mixes with the salt water; and if I find no rocks or danger in the way, the white men’s vessels will come and trade at Segu, if Mansong so desires.
Mungo Park
P.S. I hope and trust that Your Majesty will not reveal what I have written herein except to your own counselors; for if the Moors should hear of it I shall certainly be stopped before I reach the sea.
After two interminable hours in the rain, Mungo Park’s emissaries leap to attention as the enormous gate suddenly creaks back on its hinges and a short heavyset man in a scarlet toga emerges and begins making his way down the line, pausing now and again to question a dripping chieftain or banter with a giggling coquette. The ambassador is accompanied by a pair of feathered and breechclouted giants with nasty flat-headed spears, quivers of poisoned arrows and great slashing bows with pull enough to pin an elephant to a tree. “Kokoro killi shirruka,” Dosita whispers, lowering his eyes. “Savages from the east.”